NEW YORK.- Sunday presents Wood Folks is Good Folks, the first New York solo show by Jacques Louis Ramon Vidal. Vidal's work has many of the characteristics of folk art - a rejection of academic technique, a preference for centralized or all-over compositions, and a prioritization of the local rather than the general. And yet his use of folk idioms has very little to do with the populist and wholesome values that underpin the majority of the work, which usually bears that name. His work is a complex intermingling of "wayward forms and subjects" treated with both reverence and skepticism.

Vidal follows the logic of his cultural material to the letter, allowing the works to create themselves. But this strategy of "truth to material" has a very different result in his work than it did in the work of the purist sculptors and architects who initially advanced the idea as a method. Vidal's cultural materials are contaminated to begin with, having developed lives of their own before he got to them, and which he generously allows them to keep. He strategically avoids what might be referred to in the art world as appropriation, instead taking his cues from the sub- cultural subjects he investigates. This is the documentary aspect of the work. But, unlike the traditional "objective" documentary of folkloric traditions, Vidal's work eschews the institutional archiving impulse and opts for a participatory role, preserving the weirdness and ambiguity of his subjects. Sometimes this takes the form of devotional objects, as in his collages. Other times they seem to be promotional objects: provisional sculptures created to promote some sort of attraction or live act, as in the albino alligator head. Still other times the subject itself remains obscure and the material means are studied and adopted from regional traditions, as in his hinged wooden mannequin works that seem to refer to rural handmade children's toys.